Martha Mitchell's View From The Top
IN Pine Bluff, Ark., she was an average Middle American high school girl. In wartime Washington, or postwar Forest Hills, or more recently in establishmentarian, suburban Rye, N.Y., she was little more than part of the background--not spectacular, not social, not smart--and only dimly remembered by her neighbors. Then, about a year ago, as the wife of the U.S. Attorney General, she told a TV reporter that the November peace demonstration in Washington reminded her husband of a Russian revolution. That indiscretion made her a nine-day wonder. Instead of fading, however, the wonder has grown. This month the Gallup poll announced that fully 76% of the American population realizes who Martha Mitchell is, establishing her as a personality who is already better known than many politicians or entertainers--and is fast approaching the celebrity of Jacqueline Onassis (91%), who has been at it considerably longer and with some notable advantages.
Martha's trademark is her mouth, literally and metaphorically. Agape with laughter and framed in dimples, it dominates the Washington social scene--cocktail parties, state dinners. White
House functions, ladies' luncheons--and shoots off for appreciative newsmen, telling it as Martha thinks it is. Her telephonic voice has become equally familiar to editors. She calls them in the small hours of the morning with pungent advice, such as her 2 a.m. blast to the Arkansas Gazette: "I want you to crucify Ful-bright--and that's that." She has been known to use the blue wall phone in the privacy of the bathroom "so that John won't know," enabling detractors to insinuate that she sometimes takes a drink or two too many. Martha's friends, however, insist that her midnight telephonitis is nothing but her lifetime habit of speaking her mind on the instant.
Martha-isms such as "Anytime you get somebody marching in the streets, it's catering to revolution," and "Adults like to be led. They would rather respond to a form of discipline" have made her a pillar of rectitude and moral resurgence to much of conservative America, a figure of ridicule to liberals and a public embarrassment to many a traditionalist Republican.
But the Attorney General, who might be the most embarrassed of all, merely smiles a wan little smile and refers fondly to her as his "unguided missile." She also has an admirer in President Nixon, who has referred to her as "spunky" and told her to "give 'em hell."
What happened to splash this sudden dazzle of national limelight over the nonentity from Pine Bluff?
A personality change? A weekend encounter group? An inspired public relations man? What happened was Nixonian Washington, which with its button-down, square-cut, early-to-bed monochrome, tends to make any spot of color look bigger and brighter. But then too, Washington under any Administration has always had a special electricity for women--a current of excitement that brings out previously unrecognized or suppressed qualities.
Tough-talking, cigar-chomping General Curtis LeMay used to snarl at Washington: "I hate it. It's a woman's town." At its heart, of course, no city could be more male. It is the epicenter where, in the world's most powerful nation, men take part in the supreme rituals of power. The millions of lives and billions of dollars manipulated each day in the White House and the Capitol and the Pentagon are counters in the most stimulating game there is.
The men who seek out this kind of stimulation make Washington an adversary city where sides are always being chosen, points scored, issues joined. It is its own small state within a state, with its high priests and ceremonies, its secret societies and passwords.
Yet none of this could take place without the women of Washington. For it is the city's social life that assembles and disperses the players of the power game, enables them to communicate, and assess each other's characters and spark ideas. The harried men hurrying into black tie as night falls, dressing in their private office bathrooms because there isn't enough time to go home (one presidential aide regularly changes in the car while his wife drives), are likely to be yearning for surcease from the evening's pleasures, the social swirl that is really an extension of the day's business. But not a chance when beside him in limousine or taxi sits his wife--freshly coiffed at Jean-Paul's, swathed in a high style that she never wore in Pascatoola, and dropping names that sound like newspaper headlines. She knows the importance of what lies ahead. She knows precisely what Curtis LeMay was grousing about.
General LeMay's woman's town includes some potent and highly motivated females. Elegant Widow Katharine Graham, 63, presides with couturiered cool and a few well-chosen four-letter words over a communications realm that includes the Washington Post, Newsweek and three TV stations. An invitation to dinner at her handsome Georgetown house is a prize second only to dinner at the White House, and her guest list is guaranteed to be more stimulating. At a party she threw to celebrate Columnist Joseph Alsop's 60th birthday, 140 guests sat down to dine under a tent two stories high. At her first party last month for Lady Hartwell (whose husband runs London's Daily Telegraph), Kay Graham threw Social Lion Henry Kissinger into a den of Democrats, including Robert McNamara, Clark Clifford, Averell Harriman and Jack Valenti. At a second Hartwell party, the guests included Chief Justice Warren Burger, Secretary of State William Rogers, HEW Secretary Elliot Richardson and other prominent Administration figures. Among Mrs. Graham's English antiques and modern paintings the talk tends to be cosmopolitan and usually un-Republican.
Amid the lavish Orientalia of Anna Chennault's penthouse at Watergate, the talk is hearty, hawkish and very Republican indeed. Mrs. Chennault, the petite Chinese-born widow of General Claire Chennault of the World War II Flying Tigers, was a major money raiser for Nixon's 1968 campaign, and the hard core of her guest list includes some of the top members of the Administration. Her parties are also frequently attended by visitors from Asia, where her connections are said to be excellent--particularly in Saigon. Just before Nixon's election, in fact, she was accused of trying to sabotage the Paris peace negotiations by advising the Thieu-Ky regime to hold off in hopes of a better deal with Nixon. These dark rumors, which she denies, threatened her status as a hostess for a time, but today "the Dragon Lady of Watergate East" is very much en rapport with such men of power as Attorney General Mitchell, Secretary of Defense Laird and FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover.
The only Republican thing about Barbara Howar is her famed friendship with Henry Kissinger, Washington's most sought-after bachelor. A stunning blonde zinger from North Carolina, Mrs. Howar, 36, got her social start as a Johnson campaign volunteer in 1964 and as the wife of a rich Washington builder, from whom she was divorced three years ago. Since then, she has lived largely by her wits (which are considerable), doing TV interviewing and being an exciting presence at parties along the Potomac--many of the best of which she herself gives in her small house in Georgetown for an eclectic, politically liberal guest list.
An invitation to Ethel Kennedy's Hickory Hill is still almost as coveted as it used to be. Perle Mesta, eightyish, the hostess who is a household word, is back on Washington's social barricades again after an eclipse during the Kennedy years brought on by her support of Nixon in 1960. Also back is Mrs. Mesta's onetime social rival, Gwen Cafritz. Atop the whole pecking order, as she has been for so many decades, is Alice Roosevelt Longworth--daughter of President Teddy, widow of a noted Speaker of the House.* She rules the roost with her crisp wit, her well-nurtured intolerances and her long memory.
Southern Accent
That Martha Elizabeth Beall Jennings Mitchell should find herself, at the age of 52. one of the most noticed women in such puissant company has been a surprise to herself and just about everyone who knew her--certainly in Pine Bluff, Ark.
Pine Bluff (pop. 57,000) is Mid-America right out of Central Casting. There is a Main Street, an Elm Street, a kindly doctor and a lot of gossip. Things haven't changed very much since Sept. 2, 1918, when Arie Beall (pronounced Bell) and her cotton-broker second husband George had their only child, Martha. She went to private schools for six years, then to public schools when the Depression hit. She excelled at nothing, except perhaps having a good time. "I liked boys at an awful early age," she says, and in one of her high school annuals, where senior personalities were characterized by book titles, Martha's sobriquet was Arms and the Man. "We certainly never would have predicted she'd ever have an opinion on a national issue worth listening to," says one of her teachers. "Martha had a good mind when she used it," says another. "But she never used it. She was a pretty, happy, empty-headed little girl."
She went to Stephens College in Missouri ("I wanted to go into dramatics and become an actress, but my mother wouldn't let me"). Then she tried the University of Arkansas ("I decided to study premed, but with my Southern accent I decided I couldn't master foreign languages"). Finally, she graduated from Florida's University of Miami, where the water-skiing was great and the social life superb. After teaching seventh grade for a while in Mobile, Ala., and hating it, Martha came home and went to work at the Pine Bluff Arsenal as receptionist to the commanding general, who took her along with him to Washington when he was transferred in 1945. Martha says she knew then that the move would change her life.
It did--to the extent of an Army captain named Clyde W. Jennings of Lynchburg, Va., a handbag salesman in civilian life. Arie Beall gave them a big bang-up wedding in Pine Bluff, and they settled down in New York City's Forest Hills, known Before Martha as the site of the national tennis championship matches. But Clyde was on the road a good deal, the marriage failed, and they were divorced after eleven years. Their one child, Jay, is now a 23-year-old second lieutenant in the Tank Corps.
Martha met John Mitchell in New York through mutual friends. He was a successful lawyer specializing in municipal bonds who was divorced from his first wife. John and Martha were married 15 years ago. They settled in Rye, a super-affluent suburb, and on the grounds of the Apawamis Club--very In and venerably old as country clubs go. But Martha did not play golf, rarely turned up at the Apawamis clubhouse. Says one prominent neighbor and friend of John Mitchell: "I never heard of anyone there who really knew her. Of course, now that she's a celebrity, everyone stands around the Apawamis bar spinning great yarns about how they knew the gal. But I really don't think anyone realized she was there."
The Mitchells sold the house when John Mitchell joined the Nixon Cabinet, and they moved with Daughter Marty, now nine, to Washington, where Martha, whose mother would not let her study dramatics, found herself front and center on the biggest stage in the world. "I have so many roles to play," she said recently in mock despair to a friend.
The Mitchells took a six-room apartment at Watergate, the parking place for many big wheels* in the Nixon Administration. There, in her blue bric-a-brackish living room, its view interdicted by a newly built wing, Martha flutters through her mountain of mail and fusses about her daughter, her weight, her clothes, her security, her public image, her "projects," and her "backbreaking" official schedule.
The letters pour in at the rate of thousands a month. "About 1% of it is unfavorable," she claims, though the Gallup poll rates opinions of her as 33% unfavorable to 43% favorable. A recent morning's sampling of letters included encomiums from a woman in New Jersey ("I think you are absolutely great. You call a spade a spade") and a Tennessee man who asked for a picture of her so that "when things go wrong, I will look at it and it will cheer me up." A man in Ohio urged her to start a national women's organization "for the American cause." She is flattered by invitations to speak. "After I blasted the universities,* I got a little hesitant to open my mail from universities. Then one day comes a letterhead from Yale Law School, and then Harvard Law School--both for speaking engagements! But I can't do any of it. If I start to make speeches, how much home life would I have?"
But how much does she have now? One typical day last fortnight, Martha gave a coffee party for a friend in the morning, went to a reception for Mamie Eisenhower in the afternoon, and dined at the Uruguayan embassy, where she and John were guests of honor. "It's almost required of you to attend those foreigners' functions," she complains. "If you miss one, they get upset--even if there are five cocktail parties in one night. I love a small dinner party, and I love to dance. If they really wanted to improve Washington social life, they should include more dancing."
Security is strict, and FBI agents are constantly in attendance, though their duties frequently extend beyond what J. Edgar Hoover presumably has in mind. Recently, on a maid's day off, Agent Frank Illig helped out by serving Marty her breakfast in bed, and in a picture spread in LIFE this fall, another FBI agent was seen ironing one of Martha's evening dresses and patiently hooking her up in back.
Martha tries to keep track of which dresses she has been most photographed in and which she has worn to the White House, so that she can replenish her supply after too much exposure. Her more distinctive fashion note is her fondness for unfashionable spike-heeled, sling-back shoes, now so out of date that they have to be made up specially for her at Saks Fifth Avenue. She gets requests for these anachronisms from fans who want them as souvenirs ("If I get any more, I'm going to take a picture of my foot in my shoe and autograph it").
Programmed Projects
Scatterbrained, overstimulated, and insecure in her role as a newsmaker, Martha likes to tell herself and others about her "projects" and "accomplishments." "I've done a great deal for the Salvation Army. I attend a lot of fun-making functions. Last Thursday I spent two hours doing publicity pictures for the Salvation Army. And recently I did publicity pictures for the pollution bit. I drove way out into Virginia to an adorable little stream that was so polluted and foamy it looked like somebody had poured in a whole bottle of Tide." One of her latest projects is an assault on smut, prompted by a spate of pornography mailed to Daughter Marty. "I sent it to the Post Office Department and the Justice Department and quite a few people have been indicted."
She complains about the "artificiality" of Washington social life. "How can you say somebody has a social life when they're programmed?" she asks. "To me, social life is playing bridge, getting to see people I like when I want to." Yet Martha is constantly programming new projects involving Cabinet wives. Last week she gave a Cabinet-wife luncheon for Mrs. Nixon at Blair House, but Mrs. Nixon's staff director, Connie Stuart (whom Martha once threatened to call at 5 a.m. because her messages did not seem to be getting through to the First Lady), told newshens merely that Mrs. Nixon was attending a luncheon at Blair House, without any mention of Hostess Mitchell. In flaming fury, Martha telephoned a Washington Star reporter, charged that "Connie is trying to get rid of me," and wailed: "How can anybody take over my party? It's just unbelievable. I cried my eyes out today. Somebody should get down and bleed for me. I try so hard."
She does. And the incident illustrates Martha Mitchell's virulent case of Potomac Fever, a malady to which few top-and middle-echelon Washington wives are immune--whether they be Watergate nouveaux, Georgetown chic, or Cleveland Park intellectual elbow-patch.
Potomac Fever is compounded of the sense of excitement, importance, freedom and expanded possibilities that grows gradually upon newcomers to Washington. It increases both their pleasure in being there and their chagrin and insecurity that it all may so soon be taken away. For some men of power and politics, the city tends to be like a chessboard, for some a football field, for others a blood-drenched battleground. For their wives it is often like a cruise ship: the rules of behavior seem formidably strange at first, as do one's fellow passengers, and one feels a yearning for the familiar comforts of home. But after a while the routine becomes second nature, and certain attractions begin to reveal themselves: the esprit de corps of participating in a common adventure, a feeling of liberation from home-town pressures and personalities, the stimulus of new people with disparate backgrounds and ideas.
Senate Confirmation
"I thoroughly enjoy being here," says peppy Anne Richardson, wife of Health, Education and Welfare Secretary Elliot Richardson. Things seem to her to have changed a lot since the last Republican Administration (Richardson was an Assistant Secretary of HEW under Eisenhower). "The town seems a lot more open," she says. "You see a broader mix of people at parties--people from different economic and social groups--and a greater tendency to mix Government and media people with the diplomatic corps. The town is more free-flowing."
Helping it flow even more freely is Mrs. Eric Ward, wife of the President's deputy science adviser. She is establishing her mark as one of the Administration's liveliest hostesses by trying to make her parties more like those of the Democrats, who are generally conceded to have more fun. "I read about those Democratic soirees in the papers," says Ann Ward. "Like that one Liz Carpenter gave the other day for Carol Channing and Pearl Bailey --and I think 'How different. They really are different!'''
The wife of one ambassador knows they are different. She recently gave a dinner for 20 well-known Republicans, ten of whom turned out to be nondrinking Mormons. Valiantly the hostess tried to disguise the situation by serving the teetotalers Vichy water instead of the first wine, Evian water instead of the second and ginger ale instead of champagne. But it was wasted effort. "A drag," reported one of the drinkers afterward.
Mrs. Arthur Burns, wife of the chairman of the Federal Reserve, is currently exhibiting an advanced case of Potomac Fever. When she last lived in Washington, under the socially dull Eisenhower Administration, her husband was an economic adviser. "This time we're meeting heads of state, we're talking to people who make history," she wonderingly exclaims. "Each time I go to the White House it's a special thrill --and we go there often now. You make that turn into the grounds you sweep up to the portico, and I think, 'It's mine! It's ours!' Washington is so exciting. It's almost too much of a good thing."
Two Washington wives who take it all in stride are Adele Rogers and Barbara Laird, long comfortably ensconced in their smoothly functioning, swimming-pooled Bethesda homes. Both have been the capital route before--Defense Secretary Laird was a Congressman and Secretary of State Rogers was Eisenhower's Attorney General. "The wife of the Secretary of State has more fun than the wife of the Attorney General," says Mrs. Rogers. That may give Martha Mitchell ideas of making her presence felt in the soft-voiced world of high-level diplomacy.
Short of the White House itself, the most prestigious Republican entertaining is to be found in the Georgetown garden or leaf-printed dining room of Senator and Mrs. John Sherman Cooper. In her Paris wardrobe and splendid emeralds, Heiress Lorraine Cooper displays an intuitive flair for the metapolitics of power--as practiced in the Senate chamber, or around the dinner table.
Republican entertaining, however, is not always polished to a high gloss of sophistication. For example, Interior Secretary Walter J. Hickel and his Alaska-born wife Ermalee gave a dinner for some of the stars who performed last week in the invitation-only gala at Ford's Theater. The piece de resistance was a rack of lamb, cooked by Wally Hickel himself on his indoor gas grill. When the grill developed a small but intractable fire, a discreet call was made to the fire department, asking for the help of just one fireman, who was to be smuggled quietly into the kitchen. Instead, seven fire engines roared up and fire fighters pounded into the house from all directions, routing the astonished guests. "I've been to some wild parties," observed Actor Jimmy Stewart, "but Wally, you've topped them all."
Sexual Quotient
Informal parties are also the rule at the Cleveland Park home of Wisconsin Senator William Proxmire, where Ellen, his bright, vibrant wife, cooks and serves sit-down dinners for as many as 14. While her husband is campaigning or lecturing on weekends, Ellen plays tennis, oversees her own small business (Wonderful Weddings, a wedding planning service) and has written a book (One Foot in Washington).
The sphere of Washington wives with secure social standing is very different from that of the young single girls around the capital. Inevitably, though, the two worlds sometimes touch. Among young single professionals, the male-to-female ratio is favorable, and a bright, attractive girl finds the cityscape stippled with graduate students, military officers, fledgling diplomats, congressional assistants, Foreign Service officers and acres of young lawyers. Among these groups, Washington's divorce rate is high--but not among the officeholders, who regard Splitsville as a state that can hinder their careers.
The irregular hours that are the city's normal working conditions provide built-in alibis for determined politicos. Some congressional wives elect to stay home rather than live in Washington at all--giving the capital a contingent of permanent "summer bachelors." But the motivated men of Government cannot afford to take three-hour lunches, and the traditional cinq-a-sept is out of the question for a 12-to 15-hour-day man. By all accounts, the sexual quotient of Republican Washington is low. The Democrats of the Kennedy and Johnson years--relaxed, open, pleased with themselves--were more insouciant about sex, as about everything else. They drank more and stayed up later and talked more about sex, and very likely did more about it than the Nixonians do. But compared with other capitals of the world, official Washington--Democrat or Republican--is outstandingly unswinging.
One reason is its high degree of specialization. Traditional capitals--London, Paris, Rome, Vienna--are centers of culture and commerce as well as government--filled with sensuous temptations and enticements to dalliance. The Washington ambience, by contrast, is a political pressure cooker--almost devoid of the soft lights and shadowed corners where small intimacies can flower into intimacy. It is slightly nerve-racking to be close to a man whose electronic "beeper" may go off any second to warn him that he is wanted at the White House; and those black overstuffed sofas in the offices on the Hill are not the most comfortable bowers of Venus.
Simple fatigue is another factor in the capital's sexual mores. Society Columnist Ymelda Dixon thinks that the men of power are simply pooped. "With the hours they put in, with the stresses they face, they're probably impotent from sheer exhaustion." Knowledgeable Swinger Barbara Howar agrees, and points out that another reason for the situation is that power is a sex substitute. One highly sexed and beautiful lady, who has much solid experience in both bedroom and board room, admits that a full day of power wielding leaves her so depleted that she wants nothing so much as to crawl between the sheets--alone.
Ruthless City
For wives--or mistresses--Washington has never been a romantic place even in the Camelot days, and it is palpably less so today. In Martha Mitchell's view from the top, the city is certainly exciting, and some day it may be a matter of record. "Just as soon as we leave Washington," she says, she will start writing a book about it. "I am a sponge," she once said. "I have been soaking up material, and it's fabulous."
Fabulous it may be, but it is tough, too --transient and lonely. Martha Mitchell, whose husband often works 15 hours a day, knows the loneliness well, and sometimes the ruthless power city overwhelms the happy kid from Pine Bluff. "A lot of this takes a great deal out of me," she said recently, and these lonely low points are likely to generate some late-hour phone calls to friends, which the public never hears about.
But the next day, Martha is ready to face them all down again with her big laugh and pretty dimples and her yellow hair piled high--"little ol' Martha," as she likes to call herself, undaunted, silly, reveling in attention, and making the staid, Republican capital a livelier place.
* Nicholas Longworth, who served from 1925 until his death in 1931. * Other well-known Watergate residents: Transportation Secretary John Volpe, Commerce Secretary Maurice Stans and Protocol Chief Emil Mosbacher Jr. * Said Martha to an interviewer last September: "The academic society is responsible for all troubles in this country. They don't know what's going on. They don't have a right to talk. It makes me sick at my stomach. They're a bunch of sidewalk diplomats that don't know the score."
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